Im-Politic: On Sports, Politics, and Boundaries

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boycotts, China, culture, entertainment, First Amendment, free speech, Hong Kong protests, Im-Politic, national anthem, National Basketball Association, National Invitational Tournament, NBA, politics, Princeton University, protests, social media, sports, Vietnam War

One my my funnest (indulge me) memories of college was driving round trip between central New Jersey and New York City’s Madison Square Garden four times one week in the spring of 1975 to see the Princeton men’s basketball team play in – and win! – the National Invitational Tournament (which was a reasonably big deal back then).

During one of the games, a friend and I unfurled a dorm-made sign protesting something or other about the rapidly ending Vietnam War. We considered it an important message to send, and given the conflict’s damage to America’s economy, politics, society, and culture, and given the destruction wreaked throughout Southeast Asia, I have no problem all these decades later with the content.

In retrospect, though, I wish we’d left the banner back on campus, because I’m now convinced that injecting political and policy debates into a college basketball game wasn’t the right decision. I’m bringing it up today because I wish those well-meaning basketball fans supporting the Hong Kong protesters and China’s other repressive policies inside the arena would recognize that these actions are mistaken, too.

Don’t get me wrong: As I’ve written, I have no problem with athletes and other figures from the sports world expressing political and policy views. I don’t find them to be of any special interest, and way too often they’re the epitomes of ignorance, virtue signaling, or both. But all of them – along with celebrities and others from entertainment circles – unmistakably enjoy the same First Amendment rights of all other Americans. (Complications do arise, however, when their free speech rights clash with their obligations as employees of companies concerned that such words and actions will be bad for business.)

In fact, I’ve also urged National Basketball Association officials, players, owners, and other employees to think much more seriously about their partnership with China (and, by extension, other repressive countries), and even consider a boycott.

But just as I’ve urged athletes to keep their political views (e.g, taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem before pro football games) off the court and playing field (because their fame gives them so many other high-profile opportunities to speak out – and to big audiences), I’d urge fans to keep home their own beliefs, however heartfelt and morally compelling. The same, by the way, should apply to entertainers turning awards shows into political fora.

For even though spectators lack the renown and followings of athletes and entertainers, they’re hardly devoid of influence. They can choose to stay away from arenas, cinemas, theaters, and other venues showcasing performers, franchises, or entertainment businesses whose actions or statements they dislike. They can also organize boycotts of these individuals and organizations if they wish – and social media gives them a more powerful megaphone than ever. (For the record, I’m anything but enthusiastic about such politicization, especially regarding prominent individuals and organizations who fail to take desired stances.)

And I can’t imagine how any court could legitimately decide that such protesters aren’t allowed to make their views known verbally and/or visually on public transportation corridors and systems leading to and servicing sports or entertainment venues (subject of course to any level of government’s right to regulate protest activity in such a way as to permit travel and other everyday activity from proceeding).

But even if businesses and organizations that stage sports or entertainment events lacked the legal authority to ban activity at events that has nothing intrinsically to do with the sporting or entertainment angle of these events (the current legal consensus is pretty unclear, at least judging from this article), would anyone this side of rational and sane really want to go to, say, a Los Angeles Lakers pro basketball game and be forced to listen to some attendees heckle star LeBron James all contest long for his failure to condemn China’s human rights practices? Or to need to see “Free Hong Kong” banners throughout the Staples Center or any other NBA court?

The law plainly prevents such heckling or chants or other disruptive behavior at entertainment events where it’s crucial to listen to the performers. But even when speaking and listening aren’t important, who would really want to visit an art museum whose every gallery contains a protester or two or ten holding up Pro-Life or Pro-Choice signs? Who would really want to walk around a Central Park blanketed with Dump Trump or MAGA posters?

The sports, entertainment, and cultural worlds shouldn’t be shielded from politics and policy, and indeed can’t be – unless we want to make them completely irrelevant to our lives and to our posterity. But given all the opportunities available to all Americans nowadays to express political and policy views, it seems not only entirely reasonable to treat actual performances as refuges – including as escapist opportunities, from these other spheres, but essential to the health and vibrancy of both individuals and the nation as a whole. And these are boundaries that a genuinely wise society should be respected regardless of whether, and to what extent, they’re legally enforceable or not.

Following Up: The Martian is Hollywood’s Latest Pander to China

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China, entertainment, Following Up, Hollywood, movies, Nazi Germany, Washington Post

Talk about cosmic coincidences! Just yesterday, I blogged on a terrific Washington Post piece that detailed how the American movie industry has been including in feature films images and story lines that flatter China in order to persuade Beijing to give their products access to the potentially huge but tightly controlled Chinese market. And last night – quite unintentionally – I wound up seeing one of those very movies – The Martian!

In deference to those intending to see the film, I won’t spill the specifics. Let’s just say that the outcome would have been vastly different had the Chinese space program not decided to volunteer major assistance. Until that plot twist appeared, I was loving the movie. Afterwards, I was feeling so nauseated that I was relieved that I’d foregone popcorn. In fact, had I known about this detail, I would have never seen the film, and rewarded this pandering financially, in the first place.

There is admittedly one complicating wrinkle to this sad tale: The Martian is based on a novel. I haven’t read it, but it’s certainly possible that the favorable treatment of China wasn’t gratuitously injected by Hollywood moguls, but were part of the original story. At the same time, there are any number of great science fiction stories and novels that haven’t made it to the silver screen.

Even choosing this one, therefore, would represent an unmistakably political move, and an especially craven one given China’s recent expansionism in East Asian waters, its engagement in cyber-hacking American businesses, its recent crackdown on legitimate U.S. business activity in China, and its redoubled repression of domestic dissent, among other transgressions. (I have fewer objections to cyber-attacks on U.S. government sites, since however harmful to national security, they do seem to examples of the kinds of espionage every government has engaged in during recorded history.)

And here’s an important historical footnote: Friend Nevin Gussack yesterday called my attention to a recent book that describes a similar Hollywood cave-in to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Here’s a link to an article summarizing it. The American film industry obviously isn’t the sum total of American culture and society, let alone the U.S. economy. Yet its national and global footprints for the last century have been undeniably massive and influential.

As private companies, American entertainment firms have no legal responsibility to champion national interests, or any other value. By the same token, however, their customers have every right to reject their products if they view them as politically or morally objectionable. So I’d urge every one who’s concerned about the Chinese challenge to America’s security and prosperity, and about how Big Business and its government stooges, to boycott The Martian, and tell Hollywood to stop shilling for a dangerous foreign dictatorship.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How Hollywood’s Been Brown-Nosing China

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censorship, China, entertainment, Hollywood, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Washington Post

One of my great fears about the breakneck, corporate-driven expansion and deepening of U.S.-China relations at all levels has always been that it would steadily infect American society with Beijing’s autocratic and corrupt official values. In fact, I’ve always considered this a far likelier to happen, and likelier to happen sooner, than the conventional wisdom (generated largely by this offshoring lobby and their witting and unwitting dupes in the political and media classes) that greater integration between the two economies and societies would foster greater freedom and implant similar Western values in China. Sadly, a new Washington Post report on China’s growing, dangerous, and hitherto neglected influence over Hollywood supports my pessimism.

Post reporter Ana Swanson tells a powerful and depressing story of how the lure of more access to China’s still strictly controlled market for foreign films has given “the Chinese government and its support of censorship” a “surprisingly big hand in shaping the movies that Americans make and watch.” As Swanson explains:

“For Hollywood movies trying to get on [the] select list [of movies approved for showing in the PRC], portraying China in a positive light is key. Any foreign film that is shown in theaters in China must be approved by the Film Bureau, part of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, which reports to the highest levels of the Chinese government.”

Swanson notes that some of the changes made to curry favor with Beijing seem harmless, and that others arguably provide “ helpful dose of cultural exposure for isolated American audiences.” But in their eagerness to expand the global box office for specific movies, and to cement their reputations as “friends of China,” Hollywood studios have also engaged in much more flagrant and troubling brown-nosing.

In my view, the worst example described by Swanson entails the 2012 remake of the 1984 Cold War action feature Red Dawn. The original depicted Chinese invaders as the villains. But three years ago, America was portrayed as being under attack by North Korea.

But this award might also be deserved by 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. Not only was the film made with an assist from Chinese media companies – which are all firmly under the government’s thumb. But it also contains what seems to be a completely gratuitous scene of a Chinese defense minister gallantly vowing to protect Hong Kong.

There’s not much the U.S. government can legally do to supply Hollywood with a backbone. And the American entertainment industry can’t reasonably be expected to ignore the potential of China revenues. So maybe the best U.S. response is one suggested by a China specialist Swanson interviewed: Require that all such films explicitly contain the notification, “This content has been modified by Beijing.” Such truth in labeling would underscore that, although Americans are confident enough in their own system’s openness to allow Beijing-influenced content into the U.S. market, they also take seriously another important value: the consumer’s right to know.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Competitiveness Hasn’t Always Required Trade

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Airbus, aircraft, anti-trust, Boeing, Bollywood, competitiveness, entertainment, finance, Hollywood, software, Trade, trade Deals, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Because the Mainstream Media consistently fronts for the economics establishment on the big issues, the appearance of this (evidence-free) post on The New York Times website Thursday indicates that a big official theme of upcoming months will be the inability of the United States to withstand a global slowdown.

This narrative is likely to be put in service of two related sets of policies that would unnecessarily slow an already woefully subpar U.S. recovery, and worsen the global trade and investment imbalances that helped trigger the financial crisis and all the misery that’s followed it.

The first, which I wrote about recently, is the reported decision to open American markets unilaterally in order to boost growth rates overseas in the mistaken belief that the U.S. economy is strong enough to afford this handout. The second is the continuing push to conclude huge trade deals with Europe and Pacific Rim countries that would produce the same harmful results because they’re modeled after a long string of agreements that have supercharged U.S. deficits.

So it seems timely to present some new reasons for concluding that America is amply capable of prospering amid global stagnation – and even worse – and that Washington should be seeking to enhance this capacity for self-reliance, not further degrade it.

A while back, I asked why the economics conventional wisdom – and the chattering class that parrots its every claim – assumes that the enormous U.S. economy couldn’t generate an adequate level of efficiency-enhancing competition all by itself, and that its integration with the larger (but not stupendously larger) world economy is needed to achieve this important goal. I’m still waiting for an answer.

Here’s some new evidence for doubting that international competition is crucial for ensuring satisfactory product quality, consumer choice, innovation, and the like – at least where American industries are concerned: Several major sectors of the U.S. economy that easily come to mind have risen to (deserved) world-leading status while facing virtually no foreign competition at all.

The first example: long-haul commercial aircraft. Boeing today is one of only two serious global players (the other being Airbus), but before the European Union’s heavily subsidized products appeared on the market, American-made long-distance craft were the only game in town. Yes, Britain produced the first commercial jet, which came into service in 1952. But a series of accidents effectively killed the Comet, and Britain’s civilian aircraft industry, and by 1958 Boeing entered the business never to look back. It would be joined by Lockheed and Douglas, but the Americans had the field completely to themselves until Airbus’ entry in 1972,  Among them, the U.S. firms manufactured generations of excellent products, along with some troubled jets like the DC-10.

I’ll be briefer on the other examples, just to get this post up sooner rather than later. But they are:

> computer software. As with commercial jets, American companies totally dominated the field for decades. Although significant foreign competition was absent, domestic competition was fierce;

> finance: Although individual European and Japanese banks and other financial institutions often dwarf their individual U.S. counterparts by various measures, collectively the American finance industry has long towered over all national rivals, and it’s the same situation for financial markets. When it comes to innovation (a mixed blessing, as the financial crisis should teach), the gap has been even wider. And again, fierce domestic competition has been the key – especially after post-1970s waves of deregulation; and

> motion pictures: Whether or not you prefer American to foreign films as a rule, there’s no doubt that the former have long ruled commercially all around the world. In fact, common features of recent and proposed trade agreements have been provisions permitting foreign governments to maintain various types of limitations on U.S. Films’ access to their domestic markets, for fear that the homegrown industry will be overwhelmed. Yes, I know there’s been a huge Bollywood industry in India for roughly 100 years. But with exceptions like Slumdog Millionaire, its offerings have limited appeal globally and simply have never come close to the box office racked up by American blockbusters.

It’s easy to explain all the above narratives with “special circumstances.” For example, American finance has reigned supreme for so long largely because the United States began the post-World War II era with nearly all of the world’s available liquidity. It also began that period with one of only three major aircraft industries not bombed out of existence (along with Britain’s and the Soviet Union’s). But these sectors maintained predominance long after postwar recovery began around the world. And the U.S. software edge, which initially benefited from military investment, grew much bigger once the largely civilian personal computing and internet revolutions took off.

Moreover, the role of special circumstances strengthens rather than undermines this post’s main argument: Foreign competition’s role has been anything but all-important. And as I’d written bein that previous post, America’s immense economy could easily generate more domestic competition – and all its benefits – with serious enforcement of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. Could more trade strengthen the U.S. economy still further? Absolutely. But the acid test of new agreements now needs to be not simply how their net gains compare with the situation in the absence of such deals, but how they compare with alternatives within Washington’s grasp that are entirely domestic.